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video
another video
yet another video

I looked at those videos, I found them to be cool in terms of the special effects that the desktop is offering. I also never want to use a computer that way. Any time I am infront of a machine that has any of those special features turned on (sliding menues even, shadows, windows showing contents while dragging etc.,) I just turn them off.

X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware).

Really? Can you please point me to some numbers that demonstrate this point?

X11 was invented in the bad old days, running on UNIX systems less powerful than today's PDAs. As I understand it, it's actually quite lightweight. Certainly the network transparency features don't cost much, because when you run the X server and the X client software on the same computer, they communicate by using domain sockets (which are very lightweight). Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X have abstraction layers that isolate the graphics hardware; do you have some numbers showing that X11 has significantly more overhead than those abstraction layers?

The latest versions coming out of X.org now have support for features similar to what OS X does: applications are rendered into offscreen buffers, and the buffers are composited together (with transparency effects, or other special effects if you desire). So, X11 is no barrier to cool eye-candy either.

The worst thing about X11 used to be way it was managed (under Xfree86). Now that the project has moved to X.org and has been revamped, progress has sped up a lot.

steveha

3. Righteous eye candy : Something like OS X

So the top reason to buy Vista is "you have to".

Well, only if you want a *nix/OSX like system that runs microsoft software.

Top ten reasons to switch to Ubuntu:

1. User Account Protection
2. Firefox
3. Compiz/glx (backports of dapper only though)
4. Desktop Search
5. Better System Wide Update. (kernel, OS, and software updates)
6. More Standard Media, default meda types don't bind you to a vendor. See also: VLC, XMMS, Songbird, and MPlayer
7. Parental control (privoxy, dansguardian, and safesquid, for those of you who want the computer to parent your kids for you)
8. Better Backups: Back up your entire system with a single command
9. Peer-to-Peer collaboration.... networking? Filesharing? what is this new buzzword, and why does it sound like what all computers have been doing for ages now? Especially Linux
10. Quick and accurate setup: Ubuntu allows you to resize partitions and dual boot without being an uber-geek.

• Ubuntu Linux is free
• It offers paid support if you need it
• you won't
• Installing software is as easy as clicking Applications>Add applications
• There are more people who know the inner workings of a linux box than Windows, so free support is a forum post away,
• Most linux software is developed for the sole purpose of having a good product, Microsoft products are developed for the primary purpose of making money
• Everyone on slashdot will have more respect for you
• Antivirus isn't an issue since we haven't gotten around to writing viruses yet either
• Having a computer do exactly what you tell it to is easier to manage and leads to less time yelling at your monitor.

To provide some alternate perspective:

Screens:

Screen1
Screen2
Screen3

Videos:

Vids taken with a video camera
New window manager video (long)

Conceivably some of these goodies could be merged into KDE. Given the blatant sexiness of this handful of technologies, I'd expect it will be happening reasonably soon.

And I believe that everywhere you see "Search", it is a beagle indexed search. WinFS eat your heart out.

To provide some alternate perspective:

Screens:

Screen1
Screen2
Screen3

Videos:

Vids taken with a video camera
New window manager video (long)

Conceivably some of these goodies could be merged into KDE. Given the blatant sexiness of this handful of technologies, I'd expect it will be happening reasonably soon.

And I believe that everywhere you see "Search", it is a beagle indexed search. WinFS eat your heart out.

XGL and Compiz

(Yes, I know XGL is not Gnome specific, but a lot of the "Gnome guys" have been working on it, and the demos show the Compiz window manager working with Gnome.)

I'm not 100% on what exactly it is you're saying, but....

http://www.linuxedge.org/?q=node/58

Watch that video and tell me that in 6 months when Vista is supposed to be shipping, that you think you Linux desktop will be behind anything. By then it's pretty safe to assume that most distros will have a reasonably well supported XGL desktop. I havn't seen what this takes to run well, but it's much more powerful than the new vista stuff.

don't know about performance, but you can see screenshots of openGL based Quake3 here:

http://www.linuxedge.org/?q=node/39

At least it seems it works fine.

I believe it can be installed on gnome.

http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

http://www.linuxedge.org/?q=node/55

Screenshots: http://www.linuxedge.org/index.php?q=node/39